A brilliant conception suffers jumbled execution

David Bonetti, EXAMINER ART CRITIC

Published 4:00 am, Friday, February 19, 1999

ADA BYRON King, Countess of Lovelace, was the abandoned daughter of the dashing British romantic poet, Lord Byron. She was also a mathematical genius who created what's now credited as the first computer program, lost her fortune at the races and, contrary to expected behavior for Victorian ladies, slept around with more men than Madonna. All before an early death at 37.

So how come we've never heard of her?

UC-Davis professor and video artist Lynne Hershman Leeson hopes her film, "Conceiving Ada," will restore this forgotten female character to contemporary consciousness. Thus, the film is burdened with a primarily didactic intention that is often lethal to art forms that also try to pass as entertainment.

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However, having cast the title role with the exotic-looking Tilda Swinton, who brings a riveting intensity to the part, Hershman Leeson may have half a chance.

But the complex narrative Hershman Leeson has created, apparently based on the structure of a double helix - the model of the DNA molecule - gets in the way. I really didn't get much of the nuts and bolts of the plot until afterward, when I read the film's production notes, a luxury most moviegoers don't have.

Hershman Leeson tries to tell two tales at once, often confusing them in the process. (The fact that the action takes place in both the present and the past makes that easy.)

In the first, a loft-living computer "genius" named Emmy Coer (Francesca Faridany) devises a program to travel back in time in order to retrieve memory. She sets her eyes on Ada and, via the device of a mechanical bird named Charlene, manages to connect with her idol.

Unfortunately, Emmy is also involved in a tedious, cliched relationship with a shaggy-haired SOMA type that takes up far too much of the early half of the film. Nick (J.D. Wolfe) impregnates Emmy, and you don't have to be a genius, in computers or narrative theory, to figure out that the film's title is a grand pun.

Flashing forward to the past, Ada conceives brilliant mathematical models as she struggles against 19th century sexism. Spoiled and willful, she dies young, but before she passes into the darkness, she connects across time and space with the pregnant Emmy, ensuring that her spirit and memory will live on in her issue. Ada gets a second chance in what should turn out to be a century - the 21st - more sympathetic to women and more welcoming of their ideas.

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"Cremaster 5" as the most unlikely comeback, Karen Black plays both Lady Byron and Emmy's mother as shrews. Timothy Leary makes a memorable cameo as Emmy's guru. Other than Swinton, the rest of the cast members, several of whom are well-known to Bay Area theatergoers, phone in their performances.

For many, the most interesting thing about "Conceiving Ada" will be its innovative technical processes. Hershman Leeson shot the contemporary scenes in 35 mm film, but the 19th century episodes are shot in video with computer-generated sets. The actors were shot against a blue background, the blue later keyed out during the film's lengthy postproduction and replaced with digitized images.

Undoubtedly such innovations will bear fruit in the future, but from the evidence of "Conceiving Ada," Merchant-Ivory has nothing yet to worry about. The costume-drama aspect of the film looks incredibly cheap and two-dimensional. There is no depth, a criticism that can be brought to much of today's art based on advanced technology.

"Conceiving Ada" was screened last spring at the S.F. International Film Festival. It was reviewed from a videotape.